Recently, stereoscopic display devices which display video images stereoscopically are becoming popular. In a stereoscopic display device, a plurality of moving pictures viewed from a plurality of viewpoints are displayed, for example, a moving picture for the right eye and a moving picture for the left eye. A viewer can see the displayed video image stereoscopically by viewing an image for right eye with the right eye and an image for left eye with the left eye.
Moving pictures for stereoscopic display can be encoded with H.264, which is one moving picture encoding standard. However, when encoding moving pictures for stereoscopic display, it is necessary to encode a plurality of moving pictures, and thus the encoding amount of the moving pictures have to be reduced compared to the case of encoding only moving pictures for two dimensional display. Therefore, if an encoded stereoscopic video image is decoded and displayed in two dimensions, there is a problem that the quality of the moving pictures decreases.